NATO and Russia renew vows of partnership at a summit Tuesday at an Italian air base outside Rome, but exactly how the erstwhile Cold War adversaries will make good on their grand design to speak and act as one remains to be seen, analysts say.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders of the 19 NATO allies, including US President George W. Bush, will be putting their names to the Rome Declaration, the product of five months of intense talks.
Final details of the pact -- which replaces one signed in Paris five years ago this week -- were hammered out by Russian and NATO foreign ministers in Iceland's capital Reykjavik on May 14.
The agreement will, for the first time, enable Russia and NATO to take joint decisions on specific issues as a group of 20 nations, although the Kremlin will not be able to veto any positions that the NATO allies take on their own.
For security reasons, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is organizing Tuesday's summit at the Pratica di Mare air force base, 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital.
Some 15,000 police and soldiers are being tasked with ensuring security for the leaders, while commercial flights in and out of Rome's main Fiumicino international airport will be curtailed.
Like its predecessor, signed on May 27, 1997 at the Elysee Palace in Paris, when Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton were in power in Moscow and Washington, the Rome Declaration is being talked up as "historic."
But notwithstanding its symbolic importance, international security analysts are asking themselves how Russia and NATO will turn their good intentions into concrete action.
"One of the great difficulties will be to find substantive things to talk about," said William Hopkinson of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a London think-tank.
For early results, Hopkinson said, Russia and NATO could look at the "interoperability" of their armed forces when it comes to peacekeeping tasks.
Russian troops already participate in NATO-led peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Bosnia-Hercegovina. But cooperation could be extended to include, for instance, access to Russia's fleet of heavy-lift aircraft for the European NATO allies, who lack such big planes, Hopkinson said.
If and when decisions are taken under the Rome Declaration, they will inevitably be set against the backdrop of persistent questions over NATO's relevance in a world in which terrorists, not rival superpowers, are perceived as the prime security threat.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson insists that the alliance remains the cornerstone of transatlantic security -- a view echoed by the allies themselves.
To back up their argument, they point to the nine eastern European nations that are hoping for an invitation to join NATO when it holds another summit in the Czech capital Prague in November 21-22.
They also recall how NATO allies invoked for the first time their "all for one, one for all" collective security pledge just days after the September 11 attacks in the United States.
But detractors point out that the Bush administration kept NATO largely on the sidelines as it started its war against terrorism in Afghanistan.
European NATO allies meanwhile have been dragging their heels when it comes to updating their armed forces, which the Kosovo conflict showed to be woefully behind US firepower.
"There's a real question of whether the alliance is dying," said Hopkinson, echoing a thought that is going around the minds of several analysts today. "My own view is that it is."
(China Daily May 27, 2002)
